Hong Kong is famous for having the freest market in the world. Indeed, that is one major reason why I moved here, and the reason for everything good in Hong Kong. Despite everything, the government here still cares about its ranking on the Fraser Institute and Heritage Foundation indexes of economic freedom.

But actually (perhaps obviously), Hong Kong is not a perfectly free market. While it is indeed freer than the rest of the world, there are exceptions to this freedom that I will argue are not minor, and are even a significant cause of Hong Kong’s instability right now. (I believe the economist Richard Wong argues along the same lines, although probably much more rigorously than I will).

As we enter 2015 and my fourth year of living in this special city, I have made a resolution to post a series of articles that show where and how Hong Kong diverges from the philosophy of the free market (or “non-interventionism” in Hong Kong policy jargon) and how in every case this is a mistake that harms ordinary people at the expense of not only their freedom of action, but directly impacts their wealth and their livelihood. These seemingly obscure interstices in the free market are actually the direct and exclusive causes of all the cronyism and much of the authoritarianism that Hong Kong is suffering from. (I think the dysfunctional and undemocratic governance structure is to blame for the rest, but that problem already has enough focus!)

With too many ordinary (disenfranchised) people openly blaming the free market for their economic problems (along with the dysfunctional and undemocratic governance structure), I must forcefully disagree and try to persuade everyone that it’s the deviations from the free market that are to blame.

I will try to argue in good faith, so if you still disagree with me please point out any mistakes you think I have made in my logic or assumptions and I will do my best to correct them!

Lastly, please do tell me now what you consider to be the most egregious violations of the freedom of Hong Kong residents, to make sure I don’t miss any out.

Quite why the MTR chairman’s seat on HSBC’s board is relevant, I’m not sure. He’s there to be given regular wiggings by the bankers to whom his little enterprise owes substantial sums of money.

Private Eye didn’t say it was relevant. They merely pointed that Raymond Chi’en Kuo Fung chairs both MTR Corporation Ltd and is a non-executive director of HSBC, a British bank (since 1997!). Private Eye is a British magazine and HSBC is a British bank, so maybe they thought it would be of interest to their readers. That banks and government are barely independent these days only increases the interest.

As for including the chairman of a company who owes lots of money on your board, isn’t that a conflict of interest? Furthermore, I thought board members had certain duties beyond being given “wiggings”. The 2013 annual report of Hong Kong Banking Corporation Limited (the wholly-owned subsidiary of HSBC Holdings PLC, and the company of which Chi’en is an NED) states

Non-executive Directors are not HSBC employees and do not participate in the daily business management of the Bank; they bring an external perspective, constructively challenge and help develop proposals on strategy, scrutinize the performance of management in meeting agreed goals and objectives, and monitor the risk profile and reporting of performance of the Bank. The non-executive Directors bring experience from a number of industries and business sectors, including the leadership of large complex multinational enterprises. The Board has considered the independence of each of the non-executive Directors and determined that each non-executive Director is independent in character and judgement and that there are no relationships or circumstances likely to affect their judgement, with any relationships or circumstances that could appear to do so not considered to be material.

As an Independent Non-Executive Director your role is or will be to supervise management, participate in the direction of the company’s business and affairs and speak out firmly and objectively on these and other issues that may come before the board.

That sounds like rather more than getting wigged.

Back to the letter:

By the way, if Crossrail is half as good as the Hong Kong MTR, it will be the best rail offering in Britain.

I personally agree with this, but I’m not sure what the relevance to the article is, to borrow an argument.

David MATHER.
Via email.

So who is David Mather? Assuming he’s the same man as this chap, he’s an HSBC stalwart who’s been involved with the bank for decades. According to his LinkedIn profile, since March 2014 he has been a Masters Student in London, long before the protests started.

As a self-described “Asia specialist”, surely the misdirection and omissions in his letter are inadvertent?

[tl;dr: Skip to the letter at the bottom of this post written by the woman shown above, and weep]

In case you haven’t noticed, Hong Kong has been convulsed (by Hong Kong’s standards) by “Occupy” protests, made under an Umbrella Revolution/Movement moniker [there are active debates about the name], which have now settled after a month into blocking a couple of second-tier roads and intersections. The city hasn’t actually stopped functioning in any important sense, but psychologically and spiritually Hong Kong has entered a new phase in its story.

These protests are too big and multifarious to discuss even their aims and motivation in detail, but one definite factor is most ordinary people’s wariness and fear and annoyance at the blatant extent to which China now interferes in Hong Kong’s politics and administration. While Hong Kong has an almost-completely separate political and administration system on paper, in practice everyone is noticing how the government blatantly pushes as much as it can in favour of the interests of the Chinese government and the local tycoons. This is not just a technical problem; it directly affects people’s lives and livelihoods, from preferring building roads to pedestrianised spaces, to manipulating the property market to push up prices. This has all been covered before elsewhere.

The aforementioned paper that keeps Hong Kong autonomous actually has a name: the Basic Law. Amazingly, the Hong Kong government actually treats this Basic Law as Jews treat the Commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai: sacred, foundational to their creed, infinitely wise, and unchangeable. This allows them to claim to be acting according to that most moral of modes of governance, the Rule of Law. And indeed, with notable exceptions, Hong Kong is a lawful society, and we are all grateful for that.

But where did this Basic Law actually come from? From the Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed 30 years ago in 1984. This agreement, as the name implies, was between the then-colonial master of Hong Kong, the United Kingdom of Great Britain etc., and the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong’s current sovereign. This agreement supposedly bound China to agree that Hong Kong would continue with its own capitalist system for 50 years after becoming part of China (again, if you like), i.e. until 2047. The Basic Law is the manifestation and codification of the Declaration.

And this Declaration is not just any scrap of paper; it is a formal bilateral treaty between two member states of the United Nations, and registered with the latter organisation. Therefore it is of legitimate interest to the whole world that the Declaration is adhered to. The UK is particularly entitled to continue to monitor the situation in Hong Kong, because it is one of the signatories of the Declaration, and indeed, Annex II of the Declaration set up a Joint Liaison Group where the UK and China could discuss with each other the implementation of the Declaration. The Foreign Office (the UK’s foreign affairs ministry) continues to issue reports on Hong Kong every six months, and even the US under Section 301 of its United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992 required its Secretary of State to “transmit to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate a report on conditions in Hong Kong of interest to the United States”.

At least the basic facts of this situation are pretty well-known by most of Hong Kong’s population, so I would presume Hong Kong’s highly educated (or at least highly schooled) bureaucrats would too. So riddle me this: why, when the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee set up an inquiry into the UK’s current relations with Hong Kong, focusing particularly on how well it “monitors the implementation of the Joint Declaration”, did one Erica Ng, Director-General of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London, send the following letter to the committee? (I have converted the text from the scanned PDF offered).

UK’s relations [sic] with the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region have always been a cordial one to the mutual benefit and satisfaction of both sides in many respects, such as trade and cooperation in education, technology, and culture, etc. [sic]

Matters such as constitutional development and domestic economic and social developments, however, are clearly internal matters for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and we strongly disagree and regret that the Foreign Affairs Committee should consider holding an inquiry on these subjects.

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region strongly urges your Committee not to hold such an inquiry, which is clearly an interference into the internal affairs of the Special Administrative Region, and to call off public evidence sessions and visits to Hong Kong for the purpose.

Best regards,

Erica Ng,

Director-General
Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, London

In light of the background to the situation that I described earlier, I don’t even know where to begin with the critique of this letter. The ignorance and arrogance it displays is breathtakingly astounding. Even without any knowledge of the situation — which I would consider in itself unacceptable in a representative of Hong Kong posted abroad — Ms. Ng’s request that the committee stops “interfering” is itself a clear example of an attempt at interfering! Furthermore, the only functions that Hong Kong is supposed to have handed over to China are defence and foreign affairs, and the committee indeed received two letters from state organs of China. So why is Ms. Ng writing to the committee too? How is this letter within her purview as a trade envoy?

So if the inference that the Hong Kong government therefore supports Ms. Ng’s letter is correct, we are in the situation where the Hong Kong government repudiates the Joint Declaration, and therefore its autonomy. And where does that leave us?

The latest issue (1377) of the British satirical mostly-dead-tree-press newspaper/magazine Private Eye contains the following story on page 5. I present it for the record with added links to the indispensable webb-site.com, an online Who’s Who of Hong Kong, as well as other sources.

Eastern Promises

The Hong Kong democracy protests might not make it to Britain, but those suppressing them, for example with indiscriminate use of tear gas, have gained a foothold.

When the London Crossrail network opens in 2019 (if all goes to plan), it won’t be operated publicly or even by a British company but by MTR Corporation, the company that runs Hong Kong’s metro system. It is 75 percent owned by the special administrative region’s government and is chaired by Raymond Chi’en Kuo Fung [錢果豐; “Ch’ien” is the surname, and appropriately enough means “money”!], a director of British bank HSBC’s operation in the territory [and with many other positions besides, including director at UGL, the company who it was recently discovered secretly paid CY Leung to support its purchase of DTZ! He also received a CBE from the colonial British government in 1994. Is that who CY means by “foreign forces” interfering in Hong Kong?].

The £1.4bn deal signed with Transport for London in March, with which London mayor Boris Johnson pronounced himself “delighted”, brings the capital and the Hong Kong authorities closer and is unlikely to do much for the UK government’s spineless response to the authoritarian clampdown in its former colony. David Cameron has conspicuously failed to back the protesters’ demands for free elections and, with a main element of his capital’s transport system soon to depend on a regional government that doesn’t want to upset Beijing, he isn’t likely to either.

Lost in translation or an educated guess? Did Zhang mean it was a heavenly gift that these dissidents even had the honour of sitting in the same room with His Highness and pretending to have a discussion, or was the comment tinted with a threat of unspeakable consequences? I’d like to think they wouldn’t go that far, but every time we thought so they managed to surprise us.

Either way, we can’t say they didn’t warn us when we see, one day, people of different opinions to Beijing’s silenced by whatever means. Just unlucky, right?

Anyhow, we have long entered an era of state level triad rule. Blackmail, anonymous attacks, mysterious “suddenly red” groups, organisations and leaders out of nowhere. It’s going from annoying to unnerving.

One common rebuttal to such lamenting I encounter is that HK had never been a democratic society under the colonial rule, so why should it be entitled to more autonomy now? There are many reasons why this is an idiotic argument (sorry my friends, I truly think so, and you’re welcome to confront or unfriend me if you think it matters to you personally). For practical reasons, the life we enjoy and things we endorse in HK will simply not be allowed with people like Zhang directing you what to and what not to think. It’s perfectly true that HK is always known for being a (relatively) free society without democracy (“有自由無民主”), and it flourished while many democracies struggle to tackle poverty. However, that was under an entirely different leadership, in style and in interest. The foundations of Hong Kong’s past success were many things, but the absence of a democratic electoral system wasn’t one of them. People were able to enjoy “freedom” because the colonial government chose to implement lax policies, a leniency that resulted from decisions made by individual governors on the advice of think tanks and advisors, which had nothing to do with universal suffrage or the lack thereof. What Zhang achieved was to confirm that the standard of leniency has since dropped considerably. Under an autocratic administration, freedom as we know it can be easily taken away, and it’s precisely why we need a better checks-and-balances system to safeguard the few rights we still have. Democracy is not some idealists’ dream, it’s a practical , imperfect tool widely adopted in the contemporary world albeit being commonly miscarried. It won’t be the ultimate solution, but it will give ordinary people a little voice and it will help people like the pan-democrats feel a little safer to tell Zhang to STFU when he decided it was appropriate to say what he did. It’s really in no one’s interest to indulge in the illusion that the current “freedom without democracy” model would be sustainable under Beijing’s watch, and for people like Robert Chow who are counting on Beijing to reward them, just remember the old lesson from those before you: to keep accompanied the Emperor is to keep accompanied a tiger. Hold on to your British passport, Mr. Chow.

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Private Eye is the UK’s best and most popular satirical newspaper, and hence just best newspaper. An equivalent in Hong Kong would be marvellous. (Tell me if you know one!). As it is studiously almost entirely only available in print form, I have it delivered to my tiny letterbox every fortnight. You can borrow my copy after I finish with it, if you like.

It is not perfect, however. Its Nooks and Corners column concerning architecture is, to this layman, extremely conservative and arrogant, rarely liking any new construction that does not genuflect to old buildings and styles. Usually I just skip it.

But I couldn’t skip over this paragraph in Issue 1364 (the 18 April to 1 May 2014 edition), about some proposals to build tall buildings in central London, some with over 20 (!!) storeys, after an inexplicable note that these buildings will be residential rather than commercial:

But are they [the relatively tall buildings] being build in the right places? High buildings, of dubious merit, suddenly seem to be springing up everywhere, subject to little planning control and regardless of any strategic plan for London, threatening to make the banks of the Thames look more like Dubai or Hong Kong than a supposedly civilised European city.

As someone who has never faced anything even approaching verbal abuse in Hong Kong, unlike in London where walking alone at night in many areas is a stupid idea, I’m curious about this racist’s definition of what constitutes “civilisation”.

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The hearses in Hong Kong are strikingly ugly. As I live Hung Hom, which is famous for its cluster of flower shops and funeral homes (uncoincidentally), I see these hearses very often, but I am still shocked each time. It looks like the corpse is being taken not a cemetery, but to a rubbish dump. Optimistically, perhaps they are taken instead to a cybernetics-enhancement station designed to make the economy even more pumped-up with regenerated elderly who have been installed with a new brain designed to lead to acceptance and love of manual labour and simple retail service jobs.

For comparison, a typical hearse in England looks like this, sleek and respectful and not going to create a new zombified workforce:

Even the magnificent and magnificently rich Run Run Shaw wasn’t immune from the ugliness of the Hong Kong hearse, as well as the ugliness of the Hong Kong media (long may the latter remain thus!):

Run Run Shaw still interesting while dead

Apparently some locals complain about the presence of the hearses, just because they are ugly, as far as I can tell, with complaints about their air pollution possibly a joke. Funeral homes are “incompatible businesses” according to some Orwellian Forum I’ve never heard of and that I hope doesn’t actually have any power to do anything except pretend it is important. At least they have enough of a sense of humour (or no sense at all?) to proudly call themselves by their acronym “Durf” in the homepage title.